Is This Apocalypse Necessary? - Wizard of Yurt - 6 Read Online Free PDF Page B

have been improved greatly over the years. No one became a 'friend' of dragons. Next he was going to tell me that this ancient wizard had taken a thorn out of one's claw.
    "This is his own account." I looked up, suddenly intrigued in spite of myself. The book had fallen open to show parchment pages, closely written in faded ink. An old book of tales was one thing—a ledger of spells written down by the man who had once worked them might be something much better. "He became not just the dragons' friend but to some extent their master, developing extremely powerful spells that even they had to obey.
    But still he, probably the greatest of the wizards of antiquity, found the magic very difficult, so he bound these spells to a special scepter. With it, anyone could force the unchanneled wild magic of the land of dragons into the structures of wizardry."
    "And what became of this Scepter?" I asked, highly if unwillingly interested. "Do you think it still exists?"
    "I am certain it does, Daimbert, or otherwise I would not be telling you about it. But when he felt his own death coming, he decided it was much too powerful to allow to fall into another wizard's hands."
    "He feared someone like Elerius among his own pupils," I suggested.
    But it wouldn't have to be someone like Elerius. The thought of any wizard with authority over dragons made me all cold inside again.
    "So he left it in the land of the dragons, concealed by spells that should elude even the best wizard—unless that wizard had his ledger."
    "Then do you have the Scepter here?" I said excitedly. With that kind of power, the Master should be able to dispose of Elerius all by himself, and he certainly wouldn't need me.
    He pulled the sheet up to his chin, shaking his head. "The spells, as far as I could puzzle them out, are enormously difficult and enormously dangerous. At first, when I acquired this book as a young man, I thought I would wait until my own mastery of magic had deepened. But with maturity came the realization that I could not trust myself with that much power. I did occasionally toy with the idea of how I could reshape the earth in the image of my own vision if even the dragons obeyed me ... But like my own master I finally set the spells aside, thinking I would reserve finding the Scepter until a desperate time arrived and I had no other choice. Now such a time has arrived, and I find my ability to work magic has weakened too much to try the spells."
    Part of the quiet despair I thought I could now hear in his voice was from loss of the powers that had been his for centuries, but part, I thought, was due to him being genuinely afraid of Elerius. That made two of us.
    "So you want me to have a dragon eat Elerius, is that it, sir?"
    "You always were one for the joke," the Master said, half-closing his eyes and smiling. I had not been joking. "I want you to locate the Scepter before Elerius does and keep it from him."
    "So he already knows about it," I said flatly. I might as well jump off the balcony without bothering with a flying spell and make it easy on myself.
    "I told him a little about it some years ago," said the Master, his eyes closed and voice low. "At that time— Well, at one point I believed he was the person I would want to find it if anyone did. And I thought it would help that he knew some of the old magic of earth and herbs, as well as the modern scientific spells we develop and teach here at the school— you know some of that old magic too."
    Though I had never apprenticed under him, my old retired predecessor as Royal Wizard of Yurt had taught me a lot of his herbal magic, when I first arrived with my brand-new and precarious school spells, and he'd left me his books when he died. Over the years I had also picked up other tidbits of the old magic. "But if Elerius already knows the spells to recover the Scepter ..."
    "He doesn't," said the Master, eyes flicking open again. "I never showed him this book I am now giving you."
    Unless